For Tonight's Show.... Motorcycles on Ice!

This past reading week, I had the chance to do many things. One of these adventures was riding a dirt bike on (frozen) Lake Simcoe with studded up tires. Naturally, all present had a go on the bike and I was left with a neat opportunity to snap up a number of frames.





Equipment
For this setting we had mid afternoon sun, strongly shining down at us, while on snow and ice (read: Bright!). This setting is pretty difficult without the right equipment. Basically, I was looking for a way to dampen the ambient sunshine on the lake, which was reflecting all over the place. To do this I used two key ingredients. One, I utilized the lens shade to help with sun flares. The Canon 70-200L sun shade is pretty deep and that helped a lot with shooting near to the sun. Two, I grabbed my Circular Polarizer. The C.Pol. helps with glare and limits cross-polarized light from the sun. What this means is that I was able to get rid of sun flares reflecting on the ice, and give the sky a far more rich depth of blue.





I shot hand held (30D) and used my 70-200mm f/2.8L IS. This lens has great AF response, it works really well at controlling sun flares in the lens, and has a decent reach for sports photography. Essentially ideal for this task.



I did not use a tripod for this adventure, since the ambient light was so high I knew I could get crisp photos without.



Technique
This was a challenging task. I'm not going to lie, there were a lot of wasted frames from that day. However, I was able to play around with framing and composition with other elements in the scene (ice huts, snowmobiles, ice rifts, etc.) to achieve interesting shots. This location also allowed me to play with fill light since I was shooting near to the sun. As a result, many of the pictures were backlit and the persons riding the bike were way too under exposed (think silhouettes). The quick remedy for this situation is to use a fill flash to bring the person back into light. However, I didn't have the foresight to bring my 580EXII flash with me and was left with only the on camera pop up flash. This flash is waaaay too under powered for this application, but it was better than nothing :).



Things I would do differently
Next time I would like to play around with motion blurs. I would like to bring the tripod (which I constantly forget) and the flash, so that I would play with ambient light. I would blur the rider as they enter the shot (long shutter) and then add a curtain flash to make the rider crisp at the finish of the exposure.